Dean Koontz: The Voice of the Night

“Mrs. Borden?”

She stopped abruptly at the sound of her name and turned to him. She was clearly perplexed. She didn’t recognize him.

“We’ve met twice,” he said, “but only for a minute or two each time. I’m Colin Jacobs. Roy’s friend.”

“Oh. Oh yes.”

“I have to talk to you.”

“I’m on my way to work.”

“It’s important.”

She looked at her watch.

“Very, very important,” he said.

She hesitated, glanced at the gift shop.

“It’s about your daughter,” he said.

Her head snapped around.

“It’s about Belinda Jane,” he said.

Helen Borden’s face was well tanned. At the mention of her dead daughter’s name, the tan remained but the blood drained out of the skin beneath it. She looked suddenly old and sick.

“I know how she died,” Colin said.

Mrs. Borden said nothing.

“Roy told me about it,” he lied.

The woman appeared to be frozen. Her eyes were cold.

“We talked for hours about Belinda,” Colin said.

When she spoke her thin lips barely moved. “This is none of your business.”

“Roy made it my business,” Colin said. “I didn’t want to hear about it. But he told me secrets.”

She glared at him.

“Awful secrets,” he said. “About how Belinda died.”

“That’s no secret. I know how she died. I saw. It was… an accident. A horrible accident.”

“Was it? Are you absolutely sure?”

“What are you saying?”

“He told me these secrets, made me swear never to tell anyone. But I can’t keep it in. It’s too awful.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Why he killed her.”

“It was an accident.”

“He’d been planning it for months,” Colin lied.

She suddenly took him by one arm and led him across the boardwalk to an isolated bench by the railing. He was holding the windbreaker in that same arm, and he was afraid that she would discover the tape recorder. She didn’t. They sat side by side with the sea at their backs.

“He told you he murdered her?”

“Yeah.”

She shook her head. “No. It had to be an accident. It had to be. He was only eight years old.”

“I think maybe some kids are born bad,” Colin said. “I mean, you know, not many. Just a few. But every once in a while, you know, you read about it in the papers, about how some young kid committed cold-blooded murder. I think maybe, you know, like one in a hundred thousand is bom twisted. You know? Born evil. And whatever a kid like that does, you can’t blame it on the way he was raised or the things he was taught because, you know, he was bom to be the way he is.”

She stared intently at him as he rambled on, but he wasn’t sure that she heard a word he said. When he finally stopped, she was silent for a while, and then she said, “What does he want from me?”

Colin blinked. “Who?”

“Roy. Why did he put you up to this?”

“He didn‘t,” Colin protested. “Please, don’t tell him I talked to you. Please, Mrs. Borden. If he knew I was here, telling you this, he’d kill me.”

“Belinda’s death was an accident,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced of that.

“You didn’t always think it was accidental,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“That’s why you beat Roy.”

“I didn’t.”

“He told me.”

“He lied.”

“That’s where he got the scars.”

She was nervous, fidgety.

“It was one year after Belinda died.”

“What did he tell you?” she asked.

“That you beat him because you knew he killed her on purpose.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah.”

She turned slightly on the bench so that she could look out to sea. “I’d just finished cleaning and waxing the kitchen floor. It was clean as a whistle. Perfect. Absolutely spotless. You could have eaten off that floor. Then he came in with muddy shoes. He was mocking me. He didn’t say a word, but when I saw him walking across that floor in his muddy shoes, I knew he was mocking me. He had killed Belinda, and now he was mocking me, and in some way one thing seemed as bad as the other. I wanted to kill him.”

Colin almost sighed with relief. He hadn’t been sure that Mrs. Borden had put the scars on her son’s back. He had been operating on a hunch, and now that it had proved true, he felt more secure about the rest of his theory.

“I knew he’d killed her on purpose. But they wouldn’t believe me,” she said.

“I know.”

“I always knew it. There was never a time I didn’t know it. He killed his baby sister.” She was talking to herself now, looking out to sea and into the past as well. “When I hit him, I was just trying to make him admit the truth. She deserved that much, didn’t she? She was dead, and she deserved to have her killer punished. But they didn’t believe me.”

Her voice trailed away, and she was silent for so long that Colin finally tried to get her talking again. “Roy laughed about that. He thought it was funny that no one took you seriously.”

She didn’t need much coaxing. “They said I had a nervous breakdown. Sent me away to the county hospital. I had therapy. They called it that. Therapy. As if I was the crazy one. An expensive psychiatrist. He treated me as if I were a child. A foolish man. I was there a long time-until I realized that all I had to do was pretend that I’d been wrong about Roy.”

“You never were wrong.”

She looked at him. “He told you why he killed Belinda?”

“Yeah.”

“What reason did he give?”

Colin shifted uneasily on the bench because he didn’t have an answer to her question, and he didn’t want her to realize that he had engaged her attention with a string of lies. He had been leading her on, trying to get her to say certain things that he wanted to have on the tape. She said some of them, but not all of them. He hoped to keep her confidence until he had everything he needed.

Fortunately, when he hesitated, Mrs. Borden answered the question for him. “It was jealousy, wasn’t it? He was jealous of my little girl because after she was born he knew he’d never really be one of us.”

“Yeah. That’s what he told me,” Colin said, though he wasn’t sure what she meant.

“It was a mistake,” she said. “We never should have adopted him.”

“Adopted?”

“He didn’t tell you that?”

“Well … no.”

He’d blown it. She would wonder why Roy had revealed everything else, every ugly secret, but not this. Then she’d realize that Roy hadn’t told him anything about Belinda Jane, that he was lying, that he was playing a bizarre game with her.

But she surprised him. She was so deeply involved in her memories, and so focused on the fact that her son had admitted to premeditated sororicide, that she didn’t have the presence of mind to consider the curious gaps in Colin’s knowledge.

“We wanted a child more than anything in the world,” she said, looking out to sea once more. “A child of our own. But the doctors said we never could. My fault. There were… things wrong with me. Alex, my husband, was terribly upset. Terribly. He had counted so much on a child of his own. But the doctors said it just wasn’t possible. We went to half a dozen doctors, and they all said the same thing. Not remotely possible. Because of me. So I talked him into adoption. My fault again. Entirely my fault. It was the wrong thing to do. We don’t even know who Roy’s real parents were-or what they were. That bothers Alex. What kind of people did Roy come from? What was wrong with them? What flaws and sickness did they pass on to him? It was an awful mistake to take him in. By the time we’d had him a few months, I knew he was wrong for us. He was a good baby, but Alex didn’t take to him. I’d wanted so much for Alex to have his child, but what he wanted was a child with his own blood in its veins. That was quite important to Alex. You can’t imagine how important. An adopted child is different from your flesh, Alex says. He says you can’t ever feel as close to it as you can to your own blood. He says it’s like training a dangerous wild animal from the time it’s a cub and keeping it as a pet; you just never know when it might turn on you because deep down it isn’t at all like what you’ve tried to make it. And so that was another thing I’d done wrong: bringing someone else’s child into our home. A stranger. And he turned on us. I’m always doing something wrong. I’ve failed Alex. All he ever wanted was a child of his own.”